Some Candidates for Election-Week Viewing

By

Joe Morgenstern

Updated Oct. 29, 2010 12:01 a.m. ET

In the dear departed past—of movies and politics alike—it seemed so much easier to pick out the good guys. They were the ones who won our hearts and got our wholehearted votes, and their Hollywood embodiment was Jimmy Stewart's Jefferson Smith, a country boy who went to Washington and showed those big-city crooks the honorable way to run a country. Then politics lost an innocence it may never have had, and the best political films have reflected its complexities ever since. Here are a few to view or re-view, and chew on.

ENLARGE

'Election'
Paramount/Everett Collection

'Election'

(1999)

If life is like high school, Alexander Payne's now-classic comedy about high-school politics nails the world we live in. On its face, which is funny enough, the story concerns a high-school civics teacher, Jim McAllister (Matthew Broderick), who tries to tamper with an election that's going to make an insufferable overachiever named Tracy Flick president of the student body. (She's played brilliantly by Reese Witherspoon.) Yet the movie makes a joyous mockery of larger issues—steely ambition, self-righteous hypocrisy, the howling hollowness of the political process.

ENLARGE

'The Candidate'
Everett Collection

'The Candidate'

(1972)

Here's a proposition that won't be on California ballots: This film has retained a special place in the culture on the basis of a single powerful and prescient line: "What do I do now?" The line comes at the end of an odyssey during which Robert Redford's Bill McKay, a Democratic contender for a Senate seat, undergoes a transformation from uncorrupted idealist to severely compromised winner. The film was directed by Michael Ritchie from a screenplay by Jeremy Larner, who was a speechwriter for Eugene McCarthy during the latter's 1968 presidential campaign.

ENLARGE

'The Fog of War'
Sony Pictures Classics/Everett Collection

'The Fog of War'

(2003)

Errol Morris's haunting documentary has a cast of one—the late Robert S. McNamara, who was secretary of defense under Presidents Kennedy and Johnson during Vietnam. We see Mr. McNamara talking straight to the camera at the age of 85. He admits that he and the presidents he served misconstrued the Vietnam War. He acknowledges no personal guilt, but he warns that governments often err without knowing it, that cold rationality is not to be trusted, and that those making fateful decisions must be prepared to re-examine their own reasoning, because you can't change fallible human nature.

ENLARGE

'All the King's Men'
Everett Collection

'All the King's Men'

(1949)

Please note that release date so you don't get stuck watching the wrong version. Robert Rossen's classic film about the rise of a Southern demagogue was remade and defanged four years ago, but the original remains the one to see. Broderick Crawford is Willie Stark, a self-described hick and plain-spoken man of the people, but then, by degrees, a bully with a taste for booze, a weakness for women and a spectacular lust for power. The film was adapted from the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel of the same name by Robert Penn Warren, who modeled his hero on Huey P. Long Jr., the larger-than-life governor and then senator who dominated the political scene in Louisiana from the late 1920s to the mid-1930s.

ENLARGE

'House of Cards'
Everett Collection

'House of Cards'

(1990)

Yes, it's English, and no, corruption in English politics has absolutely nothing to do with the simon-pure nature of our process. That said, this satiric trilogy is as pungent as any contemporary miniseries to come from the BBC. The late Ian Richardson stars as the suavely scurrilous Conservative party whip, Francis Urquhart. He's confronted with the question of what to do in the wake of Margaret Thatcher, and the answer comes fairly easily to him—do whatever it takes to reach the top of the heap and become prime minister himself. Mr. Richardson's performance is nothing short of magisterial—malign magisterial—and a large cast gives distinguished support. Diane Fletcher is Lady Macbeth to Urquhart's peerless conniver, and Michael Kitchen does a regal take on Prince Charles.

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